Freed loyalist killer sent back to jail to serve 12 life sentences

A multiple loyalist paramilitary killer has been sent back to prison to serve the rest of his 12 life sentences.

Torrens Knight was back in jail tonight after Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland secretary, decided the UDA terrorist had broken the terms of his early release licence.

Knight was freed early from his sentences under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement after serving only seven years. But last week he was found guilty of attacking two sisters in a bar in Coleraine on 30 May 2008.

His licence was suspended by Woodward who said Knight's convictions for assault and disorderly behaviour demonstrated that he had "breached the terms of his life licence" and presented "a risk to the safety of others".

"I cannot permit freedom to any individual intent on abusing the opportunity they have been given to benefit from the early release scheme," Woodward said.

The Sentence Review Commissioners will now determine if the early release licence granted to Knight in July 2000 should be revoked.

Knight was part of a UDA murder squad that gunned down eight people inside the Rising Sun bar in the County Derry village of Greysteel at Halloween 1993.

One of the gunmen shouted "trick or treat" before opening fire on customers.

Knight was also convicted of four murders in Castlerock, Co Derry including an IRA member. The mass murderer caused further fury at his trial when he smiled and gloated in front of the cameras over what he had done. He also provoked outrage for wearing a poppy during his trial even though one of his victims in the sectarian massacre was a former soldier.

The Greysteel atrocity took place just week after the IRA bomb on Belfast's Shankill Road that killed nine Protestant civilians and the bomber.

In 2005, another of the Greysteel killers, Stephen Irwin, who had also been released early under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, was convicted of slashing a football supporter with a knife during an Irish Cup Final football match.